Before electronic mail (e-mail), computer users communicated using bulletin board systems, which are computer systems equipped with one or more modems or other means of network access that serves as an information and message-passing center for remote computer users. Often, bulletin board systems are focused on special interests, such as science fiction, movies, Windows software, Macintosh systems, etc., and can have free or fee-based access, or a combination of both. Computer users dial into a bulletin board system with their modems and post messages to other bulletin board system users in special areas devoted to a particular topic, in a manner reminiscent of the posting of notes on a cork bulletin board. With the growing popularity of electronic mail, bulletin board systems have disappeared.
There is an unspoken electronic mail convention in that a reply to a piece of e-mail is expected. To do otherwise would be considered uncouth in the etiquette of exchanging information using electronic mail. This is because electronic mail is a private communication between two parties. But there are situations in which a user may wish to express his opinions to the world without an expectation of a reply. For example, upon reading an on-line article, the user may strongly disagree with the viewpoint of the article and may thereby desire to voice his opinion about the article. Electronic mail seems an inappropriate facility to publicly express one's opinions. These and other problems associated with electronic mail have resurrected the use of bulletin board systems in the form of message boards on the World Wide Web. See system 100 shown in FIG. 1.
The system 100 includes the personal computer 102, which is a computer designed for use by one person at a time. Personal computers do not need to share the processing, disk, and printer resources of another computer. IBM PC-compatible computers and Apple Macintoshes are both examples of personal computers. If the personal computer 102 employs a graphical user interface, a mouse 104 coupled to the personal computer 102 can be used to navigate a pointer in the graphical user interface and applications running on such a graphical user interface.
One application example is application 106, which is a program designed to assist in the performance of a specific computing task, such as word processing, accounting, or inventory management. In the illustrated instance, the application 106 is a Web browser, which is a piece of software that lets a user view HTML documents and access files and software related to those documents. The application 106 includes a toolbar 106D, which is a horizontal space at the top of a window that contains a number of buttons in iconic form 106A-106C to allow a user to access various Web pages, which is formed from a total set of interlinked hypertext documents residing on HTTP servers all around the world. The button 106A, which appears as a left pointing arrow enclosed by a circle, allows the user to move backward through a history of displayed Web pages. The button 106B, which appears as a right-pointing arrowhead enclosed in a circle, allows the user to advance to new Web pages previously undisplayed. The button 106C is a HOME button that appears as a simple house enclosed in a circle, which returns the user to a home page when clicked upon. Appearing in the right corner of the toolbar 106D is the name of the page, which in this instance is “HOME.”
A frame 106E defines a rectangular section of the application 106, which is subjacent to the toolbar 106D, and allows Web pages to be displayed. Web pages are written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), identified by URLs (uniform resource locators) that specify the particular machine and path name by which a file can be accessed, and transmitted from server to end user under HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). In the illustrated instance, the frame 106E displays an on-line article, which is a composition forming an independent part of an online publication. The article has a title, “2 INGREDIENTS TO CREATE WEALTH!” A portion of the article appears in the frame 106E: “If you are in your thirties, you have thirty years or more until your retirement. You have the first ingredient to create wealth—time.” As is typical, at the end of the article there is a way for the user to rate the article. Line 106F displays a sentence with various numerical designations, allowing the user to classify or assign the relative rank of the article: “RATE THIS ARTICLE 1 2 3”. The underlined numerical designations (1, 2, and 3) signify that the user may use the mouse 104 to select one of the numerical designations to classify the article. Alternatively, the user may select a hyperlink “POST A MESSAGE TO A MESSAGE BOARD” at line 106G to voice his opinion about the on-line article.
Upon selection of the hyperlink at line 106G, the user is brought to a message board, which operates much like a bulletin board system. If the user has not logged into the bulletin board system that maintains the message board, the user will be asked to enter a user name, password, and so on, in order to access the message board in which a user may post messages. The main problem is that because each message board is maintained by a different bulletin board system, the user has to enter different pieces of information just to post messages. For example, message boards maintained by different bulletin board systems require different user names and passwords for a user. For the user to track and remember a multitude of different user names and passwords is not only onerous but becomes impossible beyond a certain number of user names and passwords.
Another problem with conventional message boards is that these message boards are maintained by the sponsors of Web pages associated with the message boards. It is in the interest of these sponsors to edit unflattering messages from their message boards. Thus, these message boards are not a public forum in which users may express their speech but instead a private medium in which messages can be removed at the whim of the sponsors, much like posting notes on a cork bulletin board at a supermarket in which the supermarket's management may remove notes that they feel violate their policies. An additional problem with conventional message boards is that they can only accommodate textual information. Users may want to communicate using information that is not textual in form.
Thus, there is a need for a method and a system for providing a forum on the Internet for threaded discussions of Web pages using text and other media types while avoiding or reducing the foregoing and other problems associated with existing message boards.